September 10 – 24, 2010 10-5 p.m. (Monday to Saturday)
Opening Reception September 10, 7 p.m.
Vera Frenkel (Toronto)

EMMEDIA is honoured to be presenting the work of renowned Canadian multidisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel, a project that carries powerful resonances to the dissonance of Calgary’s urban and natural landscape. Once Near Water: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive is a work about a city cut off from its lake, and in trouble: where scaffolding serves as metaphor for both aspiration and loss. The opening launch of this work coincides with the release of our new CRASH! anthology of critical texts.

Vera Frenkel is one of Canada’s most renowned multidisciplinary artists, respected both internationally and at home. Her installations, videotapes, performances and new media projects address the forces at work in human migration, the learning and unlearning of cultural memory, and the ever-increasing bureaucratization of experience.

www.verafrenkel.com
www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing
www.the-national-institute.org/tour

Scholarship Program Participants: Marbella Anne Carlos, Josh Fraser, Yvonne Kustec.
Bars ‘n’ Tone Program Participants: Andrea Mann, Alex Moon, Murray Smith.

EMMEDIA supports the innovative and challenging work of a variety of artists working in an array of genres.
Each year we invite applications for our production access programs and residencies which provide recipients with production resources and mentorship. Our support to media artists extends beyond video art to encompass the exploration of diverse forms of time-based art including: installation, documentary, narrative, animation and experimental film, performance, new media, audio, and web-based projects.

Since 2009, EMMEDIA has showcased the results of the annual Production Access Program at the historic Plaza Theatre. This signature event exposes new audiences in Calgary to the experimental media arts practice of emerging and established artists.

For this interactive installation / audio performance, a steel grain bin will be reconstructed in an urban setting and used as a catalyst for sound creation. The audio created and captured is informed by an industrious, agricultural way of life: the sounds of the prairie wheat belt. In a way, the performance and the audio is a swan song for rural life that is slowly disappearing and being replaced by technologically advanced mechanisms and corporate ownership. This installation and performance are presented by EMMEDIA as part of the 5th Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival. For more information on this performance, go to www.mstfestival.org.

Presented as part of the Calgary Folk Music Festival, Alexis O’Hara’s installation offers an opportunity for experimental folk dissonance.

Installed outdoors in a park setting, the amplified inward – facing speaker cabinets, assembled in the shape of a dome. The structure gains integrity as it is built higher, the pressure from the surrounding speakers offers structural sustainability. Viewed from outside, it is a free-standing, brown dome set in the landscape of the borderless, interdisciplinary artworld. Inside, it is a squat with a wicked, yet recycled, sound system that one can play using microphones. Gathering over 100 castoff audio speakers -generously donated by the local community- into the shape of an igloo, O’Hara is radicalizing her practice by intuitively revisiting one of the most universal of architectural forms: the dome. An important function of the project is to stimulate spontaneous collaborative sound making. It is a terrain for improvised performance. Feedback is not a problem or a priority but, rather, an interesting subject.

This is the third incarnation of Squeeque, following installations in Montreal and Berlin – which was subsequently mounted in Maubeuge, Creteil and Lille (France). A fourth incarnation will be built in September in the Hague (Netherlands).

Alexis O’Hara is a transdisciplinary artist whose work comprises elements of cabaret, pop music, spoken-word, stand-up comedy, vocal and electronic music and, more recently, photography and sound installation. The eclecticism of her work attracts international programmers from various disciplines. She has presented work in Scotland, Austria, Mexico, Germany, Belgium, France, England, Ireland, Slovenia, Australia, the U.S. and across Canada. She lives and works in Montreal.

Check out the article in Calgary’s FFWD (Fast Forward Weekly):
http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/visual-arts/micropreviews-6041/

FOR AGES 13 – 17

CAMP ONE:
JULY 26 – 30, 2010
9AM – 4PM
COST: $250 + GST

CAMP TWO:
AUG 23 – 27, 2010
9AM – 4PM
COST: $250 + GST

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD REGISTRATION FORM.

EMMEDIA is Calgary’s premier centre for the Media Arts. We are excited to offer for the first time a youth camp dedicated to all forms of Media Art – video, audio, web etc. Participants will enjoy 5 days of fun and creativity through various forms of expression – narrative, documentary, experimental, public service announcements, audio/radio and web. Groups will leave with short original media arts work.

Participants will learn how to operate EMMEDIA’s state of the art video and audio equipment, brainstorm project ideas, build and plan projects, and produce, edit & present Media Art to the public.

Classes will be held at EMMEDIA and taught by instructors who are qualified and experienced artists. The camp runs Monday to Friday with a screening/performance of the participants work Friday afternoon for friends and family. Participants will leave with a DVD of all work produced that week.

Lunch will be supervised.

For more information please contact Eric Becker at 403.263.2838 or production@emmedia.ca

SCHEDULE:

Day 1:
- Orientation
- Introduction to various forms of Media Art
- Every day starts with art: screening of short media art work
- Technical workshop (camera, audio, lighting)
- Technical exercises (scavenger hunts)
- Project ideas and group brainstorming
- Team planning and project rough outlines

Day 2:
- Every day starts with art: screening of short Media Art work
- Project development and detailed outlines
- Team meetings with EMMEDIA’s EManimenteur for project mentorship
- Technical workshop review (scavenger hunt 2)
- Project scripting and storyboarding
- Project production planning

Day 3:
- Everyday starts with art: screening of short Media Art work
- Production meeting and review
- Production

Day 4:
- Every day starts with art: screening of short Media Art work
- Finish production
- Post-production (editing)

Day 5:
- Every day starts with art: screening of short Media Art work
- Finish post-production
- Group viewing and critique
- Friends and family viewing in EMMEDIA’s screening room

Rex vs. Singh trailer

EMMEDIA presents this innovative collaborative video that draws out a little-known yet contentious narrative in Canada’s history. In 1915, two Sikh mill-workers, Dalip Singh
and Naina Singh, were entrapped by undercover police in Vancouver and accused of sodomy. This experimental video stages scenes from their trial, told four times: first as a period drama, second as a documentary investigation of the case, third as a musical agit-prop, and fourth, as a deconstruction of the actual court transcript.

Dalip and Naina were arrested one year after the infamous Komogata Maru incident, in which the Japanese-owned ship and its 376 would-be immigrant passengers from British India, mostly Sikhs, were turned back after sitting in Vancouver harbour for two months without being allowed to land. The South Asians, all British subjects, had hoped to challenge a systemically racist regulation that required potential immigrants to undergo a “continuous journey” from their country of origin, an impossibility deliberatelycreated for people from the sub-continent.

Between 1909 and 1929, an inordinate number of men tried for sodomy in Vancouver were Sikhs. Based on the 1915 case, Rex vs. Singh is a speculative exploration of the interplay between homophobia and racism in this little-known chapter of Canadian history.

Rex vs. Singh was commissioned by the Queer History Project of Out on Screen Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

In a commissioned critical text about this video, Former Calgary artist and EM Member Karilyn Ming-Ho argues for a concept of reenactment that uses Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal return”, as a model for reenactment and performance. This model is a cyclical rather than a linear one, focusing on the concept of revisitation of the past in the present, keeping in mind that everything must return back to us. She places emphasis on the ethical dimension to Neitzsche’s “eternal return”, which is central to reenactment or revisitation of any art form or medium in its ability to wield difference, rather than sameness.

Artist Bios:

Richard Fung is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic whose work deals with the intersection of race and queer sexuality, and with issues of post-colonialism, diaspora, and family. His award-winning tapes, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Islands (2002), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and broadcast across North America. His essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including his famous “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in How Do I Look?, ed. Bad Object-Choices (1991). A former Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University and winner of the Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art, he teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

John Greyson was born 1960 in Nelson, B.C.. He is a prolific video artist, filmmaker and writer whose work has been screened in numerous international festivals and venues. He studied visual art in London, ON and in 1991 attended the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto. He has organized numerous video screenings and written extensively about contemporary media issues. He was the coordinating producer of AIDS (Angry Initiatives/Defiant Strategies) for Deep Dish Television Satellite, California, and a co-organizer of Video Against AIDS produced by the Video Data Bank, Chicago. Greyson has recently edited an anthology of writings on AIDS and is currently working on his second feature film.

Ali Kazimi is a documentary filmmaker whose research interests include race, migration, indigineity, history and memory, with a particular interest in South Asia and Canada. He also has a keen interest in emerging and cutting-edge digital image technologies. In addition to his creative roles, Kazimi has worked as a film/video instructor. He was the President of the Independent Film and Video Alliance 1992-93, and the Co-Chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus – Toronto 1996-97. Kazimi joined the full-time faculty in York University’s Film Department in 2006. He is currently working on film that re-examines the 1947 partition of British India.

Karilynn Ming Ho is a visual artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her practice involves the research and exploration of various formal and conceptual frames existent in performativity. Her work exists through live actions, video, installation, and photography. She has exhibited her video and performance-based works extensively
throughout Canada.

Friday, June 25th, 2010
7:00 PM
Plaza Theatre – 1133 Kensington Road NW
As part of the Sled Island Film Festival

Presented by Metro Cinema and the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society (AMAAS)
with the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF), EMMEDIA Gallery & Production Society and Quickdraw Animation Society (QAS)

Calgary-based media artists are responsible for ten of the fourteen films and videos featured in Prairie Tales 12, Alberta’s annually produced touring anthology of short works made by artists from the province. By happy coincidence, the seventy-five minute program of animated, live action, documentary and experimental shorts will also premiere in Calgary this Friday June 25, 2010 at the Plaza Theatre at 7:00 pm as part of the Sled Island Film Festival.

As usual, animated works are a mainstay of this year’s line-up. New to Prairie Tales are Calgary animators Greg Doble, creator of Coffee Stop, and Jason Mosher, who brings us Would you believe it’s the end of the world, Kenneth? They join Calgary veterans Lyle Pisio, who returns for a second year in a row with his stop motion piece The Empress, and the perennial Kevin D.A. Kurytnik and Carol Beecher, who are back with the latest episode in their ongoing Intergalactic Who’s Who series, The El-Huge-O Maximus.

More experimental and offbeat works on this year’s program also coming out of Calgary are Caitlind r.c. Brown’s s p a c e, Xstine Cook’s Tar Sand Pudding, Kyle Whitehead’s Maverick and A Dozen Ways, from Andrea D. Mann. The final two works with a Calgary pedigree are T.J. Lynch’s live action drama, Water Under the Bridge and comedy troupe Sciencebear’s Greenwash Gang, directed by Ian Day.

As for the other four pieces on the program, two – Escape from Death Planet and Punchlines – are by Edmonton filmmakers James Cadden and Trevor Anderson respectively; Sherlye Carlson, whose Glimpes of Injustice: The Annual Olive Harvest in Palestine is Prairie Tales 12’s lone documentary, is based in Onoway; and Tales from the Heart is a collaborative effort by four animators working out of Banff Centre for the Arts, Tyler Jordan, Afshin Vahabzadeh, Saki Murotani and Price Morgan.

After its premiere, Prairie Tales 12 will be promoted for exhibition in communities across Alberta and beyond until August 31, 2011. Prairie Tales is presented by Edmonton’s Metro Cinema and the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society (AMAAS) with the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Contact:
Ian Leung, Prairie Tales Tour Coordinator
prairietales@metrocinema.org or 780.482.6523

Prairie Tales 12
Alberta 2009, 75 min, Various directors

Metro Cinema and the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society are proud to present the latest edition of our annual Prairie Tales tour of short Alberta-made films and videos. Included in this year’s festival of live-action, animated and experimental works are:

s p a c e
Calgary 2010, 4:00, Dir: Caitlind r.c. Brown

An experimental work described as a frustrated love story about astronauts and rocket ships, spaces between people and the human desire for closeness.

Escape from Death Planet
Edmonton 2009, 7:00, Dir: James Cadden

Three research facility workers are left behind on a distant planet that’s been evacuated after an attack by never before seen life forms.

Tales from the Heart
Banff 2009, 2:57, Dir: Tyler Jordan, Saki Murotani, Price Morgan, Afshin Vahabzadeh

An animated fantasia taking the human heart as its theme offers a wild ride through the body, the gutter and the cosmos.

Tar Sand Pudding
Calgary 2010, 4:56, Dir: Xstine Cook

Three kids take on Alberta’s oil sands and create a holy mess of their own, complete with oil-drowned ducks, in this send-up of a cooking show.

A Dozen Ways
Calgary 2009, 5:06, Dir: Andrea D. Mann

A change of circumstances prompts a sweet and quirky young woman to abandon previous assumptions and embrace a more free and creative way of life.

Water Under the Bridge
Calgary 2009, 13:15, Dir: T.J. Lynch

A man scatters his father’s ashes from an old iron bridge and must confront tragic memories from thirty years before.

Coffee Stop
Calgary 2009, 1:00 Dir: Greg Doble

A man detached from reality seeks reconnection through a morning ritual at his local cafe.

Maverick
Calgary 2009, 6:46, Dir: Kyle Whitehead

An experimental rhapsody in Super 8 celebrating film as an artistic medium.

Punchlines
Edmonton 2009, 5:00, Dir: Trevor Anderson

The filmmaker examines an early motivation for becoming an artist in a piece that is shot entirely on an iPhone.

Glimpses of Injustice: The Annual Olive Harvest in Palestine
Onoway 2009, 7:57, Dir: Sheryle Carlson

A documentary about Palestinian farmers’ struggle to access their lands during the annual olive harvest.

Intergalactic Who’s Who: The El Huge-O Maximus
Calgary 2010, 1:30, Dir: Kevin D.A. Kurytnik & Carol Beecher

An animated spoof about a strange creature that grows to giant proportions on its distant and dangerous, native planet.

The Empress
Calgary 2009, 8:25, Dir: Lyle Pisio

A wistful stop motion animation piece about loneliness and lost chances.

Greenwash Gang
Calgary 2008, 5:00, Dir: Ian Day

A group of money-launderers prepare themselves for their first attempt at a really big heist.

Would you believe it’s the end of the world, Kenneth?
Calgary 2009, 0:50, Dir: Jason Mosher

One night, the world just…ends.

Media lab – http://www.nnmedialab.com
G8Project site – http://www.nnmedialab.com/projects
G8Project blog – http://www.g8summit2010.blogspot.com
G8Project video promo – http://www.vimeo.com/10901075

In partnership with the Near North Mobile Media Lab Collective, EMMEDIA presents a free online screening of the AGITPROP10: G8 Summit Artists Residency Online Exhibition. This residency is organized by The Near North Mobile Media Lab Collective in Huntsville, Ontario.

Videos will be available for viewing at the EMMEDIA Resource Centre June 19 – July 2, 11 – 5 or by appointment.

As the closest media access centre to the conference, the Near North Mobile Media Lab Collective developed an “artistic” presence at the site of the conference and in nearby
North Bay where security forces for the event will be assembling and staying. The G8 Residency Project involves the Media Lab moving to a site adjacent to the Deerhust facility, obtaining press passes for the residing artists and commissioning four media artworks arising from the events of the G8 summit. The Media Lab will also be transforming itself into a broadband media uplink site for the residing artists and foractivist documentarists who are unofficially attending the summit.

The objective of the project is to create an artists residency at the G8 summit in Huntsville that will focus media and government attention upon contemporary media arts and on the political issues that are of interest to contemporary media artists.

This project will give residents and outsiders a broadcast voice for the event and will result in the creation of multiple media artworks. The four invited artists will stay at the site and create a work, or show paintings, or do performances or simply interact with the G8 attendees.

Artists:

Kika Thorne (Toronto) has been an activist video artist for over a decade and has proven to be fearless in her search for truth in art. She is now creating paintings that directly address issues of globalization and global conflicts. Kika wants to create an outdoor exhibition at the site and allow the art to create dialogue between G8 participants and local residents.

Dick Averns (Calgary) is well known across the country for his political performances and for his work with isolated communities (especially the military community). He will be photographing the G8 site and documenting as well as creating a new performance piece while at the trailer.

Jonathan Culp (Toronto) is a Toronto film and video artist who travels the country as the notorious Satan McNuggitt. His new style of documentary is humourous and fearless, absolutely truthful and yet silly. It is a subjective voice creating art from the tools of documentary film making.

Jason Jones (New York) is the choice of our partner gallery for this project in New York city. According to Not an Alternative Arts Collective curator, Winnie Fung, Jones is an “activist artist” who actually follows these summits around the world gathering information for his art and trying to understand the process of global government. Jason has just completed a project for the Tate Modern in London.

EMMEDIA will be presenting 5 selections from our Production Access Program at this year’s Sled Island Film Festival.

Check out the line up at www.sledisland.com/film.

The AMAAS symposium will explore issues in media arts programming, discuss funding strategies, and provide networking opportunities to those interested in the Province’s film festival and media arts programming community.

Symposium Schedule:

Panel I: 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Movies that Matter: the role of film festivals and media arts programming in Canadian Society. Sponsored by the University of Calgary

Panel II: 10:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Pandora’s Treasure Chest: Film Festival Funding: do current public and private funders meet the operation needs of existing and emerging film festivals and media art programming organizations?

12:15 PM – 1:45 PM
Networking Lunch.

Panel III: 1:45 PM – 3:15 PM
New Reflections on the Silver Screen: pushing the boundaries of media art presentation. Sponsored by EMMEDIA

Panel IV: 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Digital Tangents: will new media be the death of film festivals? Sponsored by NUTV

5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Media Arts Community Reception: presentation of the 2010 Spirit of Helen Award.

The symposium will serve a continental breakfast, lunch and reception appetizers. Symposium attendees will have the option to be lodged on campus at the new Hotel Alma or the University Residences.

NUTV will be filming the symposium and uploading the panel discussions to the Internet for a larger film festival community to access.

AMAAS will provide up to 10 bursaries for interested out-of-town attendees with financial need.

- To register call: 403-890-7278 or email: conference@amaas.ca -